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Category: Funny Banter Poems
       Classic humorous and funny poems in a playful, teasing, and good-natured way.

  THE PLAYED-OUT HUMOURIST  

Quixotic is his enterprise and hopeless his adventure is,
    Who seeks for jocularities that haven't yet been said;
The world has joked incessantly for over fifty centuries,
    And every joke that's possible has long ago been made.
I started as a humourist with lots of mental fizziness,
    But humour is a drug which it's the fashion to abuse;
For my stock-in-trade, my fixtures and the good-will of the business
    No reasonable offer I am likely to refuse.
                        And if anybody choose
                        He may circulate the news
    That no reasonable offer I am likely to refuse.

Oh, happy was that humourist--the first that made a pun at all--
    Who when a joke occurred to him, however poor and mean,
Was absolutely certain that it never had been done at all--
    How popular at dinners must that humourist have been!
Oh, the days when some step-father for a query held a handle out,--
    The door-mat from the scraper, is it distant very far?
And when no one knew where Moses was when Aaron put the candle out,
    And no one had discovered that a door could be a-jar!
                        But your modern hearers are
                        In their tastes particular,
    And they sneer if you inform them that a door can be a jar!

In search of quip and quiddity I've sat all day alone, apart--
    And all that I could hit on as a problem was--to find
Analogy between a scrag of mutton and a Bony-part,
    Which offers slight employment to the speculative mind.
For you cannot call it very good, however great your charity--
    It's not the sort of humour that is greeted with a shout--
And I've come to the conclusion that my mine of jocularity,
    In present Anno Domini is worked completely out!
                        Though the notion you may scout,
                        I can prove beyond a doubt
    That my mine of jocularity is worked completely out!

                                                                            W. S. Gilbert.


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